African Union and the DevelopmentalTransformation of Africa: Challenges, Achievement and Prospects

Abstract

Over the past decades we have witnessed developmental growth across Asia and the rise of emerging economies like China, India, Singapore, and Malaysia thus giving birth to the epithet; the "Asian Tigers", but Africa has suffered from relative economic stagnation and poor development. This paper evaluates the activities of AU with respect to these specificities in tackling past and present challenges facing the continent in the wave of Afro-pessimists' argument that Africa cannot claim its place in the 21st century. The paper identified the challenges facing the AU in coordinating African developmental transformation but recognised the fact that Africa of the end of the first decade of the 21st century is not exactly the same as the Africa of the early sixties in term of developmental improvement. The study recommended that AU focus on issues such as the high mobility of African people, and its consequences in terms of citizenship rights; the issue of natural resource management and food security; the recurrent problem of African integration with a focus on the issue of common borders and most importantly, the issue of competing regionalism especially on the polarisation of the continent along Anglo-francophone delineation. The paper adopted qualitative methodology.